Zujava My New Favourite Writing Platform

What is Zujava?

Zujava is a new revenue sharing writing platform a lot like the well known Squidoo. Except the really great part about Zujava is the fact that they have "standards".

Squidoo has been in a lot of trouble lately and the traffic from google has decreased by 50% in a lot of cases. Squidoo themselves have also been alienating a lot of their veteran contributors by trying to repair damage that they have let get worse for years.

For years squidoo let everyone join and create lenses (web pages) and never really put a lot of restriction on what people published to the internet. A lot of these pages were spammy and damaging to squidoo's reputation. Google finally decided that a lot of squidoo's content was now undesirable and "slapped them" with a significant decrease in traffic being sent their way. This is hurting squidoo even more because in trying to manage the poor content issue they have put algorithms and filters in place that are seemingly faulty and are snagging perfectly reputable authors and their pages. I haven't been touched yet and all my pages are still intact, but who knows for how long.

This is where Zujava is fast becoming a place for talented lensmasters from squidoo to migrate to. Zujava has standards and before you can publish leaves (web pages) you have to create 3 leaves and then submit the for a quality review by Zujava editors. If they believe your pages are up to scratch you get released from what they call the "petting zu" and you are free to publish your pages for the world to see.  

This is great news because Zujava is going to be the next big platform to create quality content for the internet. The fact that Zujava have created standards from the start is going to look really good to search engines as the quality content produced on Zujava grows. 

At this point in time If you are looking to start writing or move platforms then I would definitely suggest Zujava. Squidoo still has good authority but is very unstable at the moment and while it will still produce decent traffic, you won't really know where you stand.

Check out this link to see what Zujava is all about. 

Create a free account on Zujava

Free Images for Use

Are you constantly looking for images that you can use legally?

There are so many great pictures on the internet and at first you might think it is alright to copy and use them on your blog or articles. Well it's not, technically it is actually stealing if you don't have permission from the original creator of the image.

There are a few better ways to find great images that you can use though.

Creative Commons

Searching the creative commons engine is easy all you have to do is pick a site you want to search. Then set whether you want to find images that you can use for commercial use and type in words related to what sort of image you are after.

The first photo on this page is a creative commons image which is a 3D rendering, but you can also find photos, drawings painting and any type of image possible, When Aliens Attack.

Creative commons search


Amazon Associates

If your looking for a product image then you can always sign up to be an Amazon Associate. Being an amazon associate you are able to use their product images as an image link that you can add to your blog or articles.

Here you can see an example of amazon product image I have used in my toy blog, Toy Dinosaurs 

Amazon associate affiliate page


Allposters

Allposters is my favourite way of getting photos or pictures for my blog and squidoo pages. At allposters they have a huge number of images that are being sold as posters, photographic images and even t-shirts. All you have to do is sign up to the allposter affiliate program and you will have access to heaps of images. The added benefit to this is that if these images are clicked on and the image is bought from allposters then you also earn a commission. Images that you can use for free to add to the visual appeal of your page and can also earn money from, it doesn't get much better than that!

Here is an example of how I used allposter images on my science blog, What causes Lightning?

Allposters affiliate sign up page


Of course there is another very easy way of placing images on your pages, and thats by taking your own obviously. I have used my own photos on many of my pages, you can see a few below if your interested.

Fisher Price Baby Toys

Baby Toys With Wheels

Fisher Price Walker

Writing For Profit - Squidoo, Blogger and More

Writing can be good fun but unless you can manage to get a book published or a good job with a paper or magazine then what is the point. "For fun" you say. Well yes but wouldn’t it be great to make some money at the same time?

Of course it would but how can you do this? Well you can use sites such as Squidoo and Wizzley to write great information and sales pages, or you can write factual or fictional pieces on yahoo contributor network. Ezine Articles is also another great site where you can write some great articles that you think need to be heard, but Ezine articles work best when you have another page to link to.

So let’s talk about Squidoo and Wizzley.

First my favourite....

Squidoo.

Squidoo is a very easy and user friendly platform for writing articles as well as being a great community full of lots of friendly people. When first starting with writing your articles, it is a great idea to search Squidoo pages on how to write Squidoo pages. I have written a previous blog post on Squidoo being my favourite. Here are a couple of examples of great Squidoo lenses to help get you started.

http://www.squidoo.com/fisher-price-walker

http://www.squidoo.com/squidtips

http://www.squidoo.com/experiments-magnets

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-be-an-archer

http://www.squidoo.com/outstanding-photographers-from-around-the-world

http://www.squidoo.com/the-solar-system-planets

There are two ways to make money on Squidoo:

1. Is to create great lenses that get lots of visits and have a good lensrank. Having a good lensrank will determine what tier you end up in. What tier your lens is in, is important because it will determine what sort of payout you get from the Adsense pool. On each lens Squidoo apply Adsense ads and all the proceeds from the click-throughs go into a pool. Squidoo takes half of this pool and the other half gets split up between the lenses, but not equally. The lenses that are performing well will be in tier 1 and then mid performers in tier 2 and low performing lenses in tier 3. A good lens in tier one could sometimes get up around $50 on a good month, tier 2 possibly 50 cents or so and tier 3 possibly a couple of cents.

2. The other way to make money on Squidoo is by using sales modules such as Amazon and Ebay. You can add related products from these sites into these modules and earn commission when someone purchases something. Squidoo also take 50% of the commission on these sales as well, but since Squidoo traffic so many sales to amazon these modules attract about an 8% commission. This means you end up with about 4% of the sale, which as a new amazon associate with no sales history is the maximum you will get anyway.

Wizzley.

Wizzley is very similar to Squidoo, you create articles with all sorts of different modules that you need to add content to. If using sales modules the situation is pretty much the same as Squidoo. Whereas Squidoo has an Adsense pool on Wizzley you use your own Adsense ID number and anything clicked through on your pages goes towards your Adsense income. This could be a good thing if you have high traffic to your Wizzley page but if you don't then you get nothing.

Yahoo Contributor Network.

Another way to write online is by joining the Yahoo Contributor Network. This Network gives you a platform on which you can write about anything you want and get paid for it. People who live in the United States are able to submit articles in a couple of ways.

1. You can earn money for completing writing assignments usually between $5 and $25 sometimes for some yahoo partners up to $100.

2. You can also submit articles for upfront payment and if they are accepted the payment is typically between $2 and $15.

3. Articles submitted are also eligible for unlimited and ongoing performance payments. These payments increase as your popularity and traffic increases. The performance payments are relatively small and are around $1 per 1000 visits and can get slightly higher. Some people make hundreds and thousands of dollars from performance payments with the right type of content.

On the Yahoo Contributor Network you can write all sorts of content including fiction, reviews, politics, opinions and pretty much anything you can think of. If you have a look here you can see my first 2 articles on Yahoo Contributor Network.

Ezine Articles.

Another great site for writing articles is Ezine Articles and it is a very professional site. Each article goes through numerous reviews and quality control to keep the whole site and its content high quality and professional. You don't get paid directly by Ezine Articles or by the performance of your articles, but Ezine Articles is very good for sending targeted traffic to your other paid sites such as Squidoo. So although on its own there is no income from writing on Ezine Articles there is the benefit of possibly increasing your income on other sites.

Here are the links to 2 of my Ezine Articles:

Help Your Baby Learn To Walk

The Toughest Iphone Case

Blogger.

Then of course there is this amazing site, Blogger. This Blogging platform is very easy to use and as it is connected to Google it is very easy to monetize your blog posts by using your Google Adsense ID.

You can also use the other method of posting affiliate links in your blog to make commissions as well. Using a Google blog like this works well considering you can use your one log in for Gmail, Google+, Youtube, Adsense, Adwords and Blogger.

So many options to choose from!

I don't by any means think of myself as a good writer, in fact I am very bad with grammar, but I do enjoy writing. So if you enjoy writing as well and want to get it to work for you a bit, then in my opinion these are some of your best options.

Remember whatever you decide to use, Have Fun with it.

How To Write Good Content - What I Have Learnt.

Do you find yourself coming up with a great Idea for a squidoo lens or a blog post and then when you start writing you get a paragraph in and then have a blank?

If you have ever experienced this, know this, you are not alone this happens to me all the time.

I often find myself unable to finish a lens that I was really excited about, this can get you down and stop you from succeeding in your online endeavors. I have a few ways that helps me to get back into the swing of things.

READ, READ and more READING. Reading other peoples lenses and blogs can help you to get back on track with your own writing. You can also just try to write something for fun. Often a good fun information lens can bring in good traffic. This can also benefit your linking as well because you can link some related product lenses or blogs to your great information post.

I once got really caught up in trying to find great products to market on squidoo and forgot about having fun. When I first started on squidoo I wrote about things I loved especially science and then I got really lost. Something I learnt from this was that there is no point in trying to sell something that you know is really sought after if you can't sell it well.

This is where I came to the conclusion that I had to sell what I knew. So I walked around my house and found stuff that I loved using. This was by far the best thing I could have done. When writing on Squidoo about products it is great to give a professional yet also personal review. People search for reviews product descriptions on the net because they can't hold and test out the item for themselves.  

You really have to be the customers eyes, ears and hands. With this in mind and the item you found in your hand, write down the points that you really like about it. Then depending on the product describe how it feels, looks, tastes, smells and sounds. If you can remember the questions you wanted answered when you bought the product then make sure you also answer those.

The next thing you can write about is your experience with that particular product. Is it something that you use all the time or only in certain situations. Have you found the item to be durable or easily broken, do the batteries last a long time or not. Descriptions of alternate uses for the product are also good it could help to put the icing on the cake. Customers love it when they are thinking of buying a product and their eyes are opened up to other possible uses. Like my Gopro camera many people buy it for "point of view" action shooting on a four wheel drive or a motorbike and even water sports like surfing. Because of its fast frame per second rate I also use it for side on action capturing that I can then slow down to watch in slow motion for example capturing an arrow going through a cabbage.  

It is the little ideas like this that can really make a product that the customer already wants seem even more appealing. It doesn't have to be something extra special just a use that the customer may not have thought of.

One of the most important things that I myself and everyone else that writes cannot stress enough is PROOFREAD your work.

I really need to take this advice myself, as I get so excited to finally have articles finished that I publish them without thinking. This looks really unprofessional when you have made simple mistakes like writing lik instead of like and cant instead of can't.  

Ask someone else to read your piece as well, they may find mistakes that you have missed and even spelling mistakes that spell and grammar check on word or pages has missed. Spell and grammar check will not pick up a mistake like "do you want a peace of cake?" as peace is spelt correctly and grammatically it is not wrong either. If this doesn't work for you then read it out aloud as it is written, this can help to identify mistakes as well.

I hope this helps a little bit as these particular pieces of advice have helped me to improve along the way. Haven't started with Squidoo yet, you can Join Here

How To Get Quality Traffic.

Here is what I have learned about getting traffic so far.

First up, "It Takes Time" Is something I hear all the time from a lot of the webmasters I have met since I began my journey. Occasionally you may get lucky and hit on some brilliant keywords that will make your site, lens, YouTube, whatever it is sky rocket nearly over night. This is very Rare.

Generally it takes a year or so to really build up an online presence, with enough of your own linkage and hopefully others linking to you as well. Once your name has sunk in and your sites have weathered a bit you will usually see a good increase start to happen.

I actually have proof of this happening. I couldn't believe my eyes when it started to happen either. It happened to one of my YouTube videos and its still increasing monthly. My videos have sat there doing a whole lot of nothing really until just a few months ago. My first videos went on youtube 2 years ago and I just left them, no marketing what so ever, no real keywords research went into the titles or description, just a whole lot of nothing really. Eighteen months later I notice that a couple of them have reached a thousand or so views which I was ecstatic about. Then a month or so after that they started to increase by 500 or so views every month until now where the video has about 6000 lifetime views. So it does Happen, Eventually. I can also see that if I had of done some link building and other promotion bits and pieces it probably would have happened in half the time.

This is also the aim of the few things I am going to list here, not to build traffic overnight but to start the traffic flow happening earlier than if you just did nothing.

Keyword Research:

Keywords are words that are key in what people search for when looking for a product, subject or information. People around the world tend to use a lot of the same words or phrases when searching for particular products. You can use keyword research tools such as google AdWords keyword tool, which will show you the amount of monthly searches for a particular word or phrase. Spend time and the longer a key word phrase you can pick the better as there will more than likely be less competition. Long tail keyword phrases are something like "animal print iphone 5 covers" or "traditional soup recipes for winter". Spend your time and play around a bit, you won't get it right straight away, I don't even have it right yet and a lot of the webmasters who have been doing this for years will say the same thing. It really is a lot of trial and error, but persevere and you will find some good keywords that you can use on multiple platforms.

Link Building:

Building links to your site, no matter whether it is a lens or YouTube video it will be equally important. Building a link to a squidoo lens is a bit different to building links to a video but there are some places that you can use for building links to both.

There are good directories for posting lenses to I won't list them all individually because there is an excellent site called SquidUtils actually created by another lensmaster and this site has some great tools for helping create lenses, it also has a good list of the directories you can post your lens links too. On squidutils you will find, links to Lensroll, Squidup and other directories, I suggest posting links to all of them.  

You can start up blogs that are related to your lenses or videos and link your blogs to your lenses and videos and vice versa. A great strategy is to pick a topic or products build some lenses, create a blog with regular posts and perhaps a video review or mention the same product or topic in your regular  vlog. Then interlink all three platforms together because Google and other search engines love sites that link to others and continue linking on and on.  

Shetoldme is a great directory that google seems to really like. It does cost a small fee to join, and because of that I resisted joining for a couple of months. Now that I finally have I regret not doing it sooner, because Lo and Behold Shetoldme is already directing traffic to my lenses, not a lot yet, but google will pick up on the linking and soon it will re index my lenses. One of my lenses in particular has started showing visits directed from yahoo, Bing and google. So I assume it has started working already even after as little as only joining a week ago. The other great thing about Shetoldme is that you can add your AdSense ID and earn 100% revenue from an AdSense advert that is added to every post you enter on Shetoldme.

Article writing is also another great way that you can provide links back to your sites. One of the best article sites is EzineArticles. You can write great articles which can provide great targeted traffic to your sales sites. Articles once submitted go through an editorial review and quality control, and their guidelines are quite stringent. It took me 4 goes at rewriting my first article "Helping your Baby Learn To Walk" before it got published and has taken me just as many goes to get my second article published. EzineArticles is a well respected and quality content site because of the strict publishing protocols so at least you can be assured that once you get an article published it will provide good quality traffic.

There are some other great ways to provide good links to your sites such as joining forums and posting and commenting with your links added in of course. You can also post on the good old social network sites like Facebook. 

Keywords and Link building are the two main points that will get you on your way to receiving better traffic. So far these are the main strategies that I am focusing on.  

So Thanks again for following along on my Journey to Making an Income Online.  

Feel free to post comments or ask questions.

How To Earn Money From YouTube

YouTube is an amazing platform that you can use to create an online income stream. YouTube can be very rewarding because if you happen to have an interesting video it can quickly go viral through sharing over the social network sites. Such sites like Facebook and twitter can really help in getting good video content to lots of viewers.

Not all your videos will go viral, some of them may not even do much at all. About half of the videos I have ever posted to my various YouTube accounts have done nothing except collect dust. Almost all the videos which have built up traffic have done so quite slowly over the last year or two. My videos have got up to a point where a couple of them are now each receiving about 500 unique views a month. That is still not a lot, but it is getting there.
Subscribers are a good thing to have because the more you get the more immediate views your video will get shortly after uploading it. At the same time your channel doesn't need subscribers to be successful. If you have good keywords and interesting content then your videos will come up in searches.

This video has over 6000 views and gets about 400 new visits every month. yet you can see that Cornelius851 only has 24 subscribers (little box next to subscribe button) which you would only expect a couple of views from.

The easy way to monetize your YouTube videos is to wait until you get to a certain view count and then YouTube offers you the ability to monetize your videos. This happens by linking your AdSense account with YouTube and then YouTube places adverts at the start of your videos, you then get paid when people click through and buy.

The other way that you can get your videos to work for you is by placing affiliate links in the description and then referring to the link in the video. You need to make sure the link is relevant to the audience likely to be watching the video. You can use affiliate links from any of the places I referred to in my first post Starting My "Making Money Online" Journey

In this photo outlined in the red box how TheLScreations has added a link at the top of the description box.

In the actual video you will need to outline some useful information or show something interesting.
For example if you are posting a video of training your dog with a special whistle then you should;
-Describe the product
-Demonstrate how it works
-Then refer to the link in your video near the start after you have introduced yourself and again near the end.

Not many videos keep their audiences attention for the whole length of the video so if you refer to the link in the description box nearly right away and then again at the end you maximise your chances of getting a click through. Just be sure to refer to it at a relevant point in the video like if you say "Hi my names Don, today I have brought along Lassie and together we are going to show you how the Magic Training Whistle works, you can find a link to the Magic Training Whistle below the video in the description box.....".

You can find more great tips and tricks in:

YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day

There are so many types of vidoes that you could make, here are some of the popular types of videos that you can post when trying to make an income;

-Review style, where you pick a product and review it, telling the audience how good or bad it was. Review videos are quite powerful especially once you have made a name for yourself as a trusted source.

-Tutorial style, where you show people how to do things such as drawing, building furniture, etc. tutorial videos are also very powerful because people are always looking for instructions on how to do something.

-Vlog style, (video blog) this can be good, if what you have to say is interesting then you can create a rather large base of subscribers pretty quickly.

-Action videos, cool action videos are great for attracting lots of attention and possibly a viral sharing if it is really cool.

-Funny videos, a lot of people have made a lot of money on youtube by acting silly, making funny songs, or just being generally funny people.

What you can do is think of something that you think you could be good at or are interested in trying and search others who do the same. By watching other people do what you want to do it will give you great ideas on how to get started.

The possibilities are endless, be professional, speak clearly and concisely and you will do well. Any questions feel free to ask.

Earn Money From Blogging.

So in my last post I let you know about squidoo but there are actually a few other strategies that I am using to start getting my online income happening. One of those is Blogs of which you can actually get income from in a few different ways. There are a lot of good blogging sites such as Blogger, Wordpress and others, I like to use Blogger as it is connected directly to google+ and all my other google based accounts such as youtube and adsense.

One of those ways is to promote your squidoo pages. For example if you happen to have a few squidoo lenses about fishing equipment you could start a daily or weekly blog about your fishing adventures and what you used on each fishing trip and then post a link to one of your particular squidoo page that is promoting a piece of equipment that you used.

If you would like to see examples of this I have a few toy lenses and I occasionally talk about them on
my Adam's Babies Toys blog.

See right there ^^^ I have actually promoted one of my other blogs, But if you head over and have  a look you can see how I have embedded the links into the text of my blog of a few toy lenses.

Another way you can earn money from your blogs is to monetize them through adsense. If you enable adsense adds on your blogs, then adsense will post adds and you can earn money every time these advert links are clicked through. Adsense income starts off relatively low but as you build more and more posts and also use adsense on youtube and other platforms you can start to build up a fair bit of adsense income.

The other method of making income from blogs is to review and promote products such as on my toy blog. Most of the pictures that I have placed into that blog are clickable links that will take you to the amazon page where you can buy that particular toy. You can also add posters to make nice photos which are also clickable and that gives the option for people to buy that particular photo as a poster. You can see examples of these posters at my other blog Science For Kids which has quite a few posters as image links. If you want to see some more examples of adds from Amazon then you can have a look at Polymer Clay Tutorials.

These are the main and best ways that you can add an income source from you blog. A few quick tips on blogging.

- keep a schedule on blog posts, your followers will expect and look forward to each subsequent post and if you forget they will be disappointed.

- Always try and make a post every couple of days or once a week if you are aiming for a weekly blog. But again remember to stick to it otherwise your traffic and your blogs effectiveness will dwindle away.

- Be friendly and engage your audience with questions and answers.

- Always keep it real and exciting for your viewers, make it about them and help them to relate to what you have to say. Give advice and on how to subjects and remember if you can give great information and advice to your audience they are more likely to stick around.

If you have any questions about blogging to make an income then ask away in the comments box.